About 30 emergency department nurses at Gisborne Hospital will walk off the job for an hour on Wednesday afternoon over staffing levels they say are no longer safe. The stoppage runs from 2.30pm to 3.30pm on 9 September, and it lands in the middle of the worst winter for respiratory illness hospitalisations New Zealand has recorded in a decade.
Clara Dolman-Tuhou, an emergency department nurse and New Zealand Nurses Organisation delegate at the hospital, told RNZ on Sunday the department was in a state of “absolute chaos” and that the situation could not carry on.
“It’s placing both the patient safety and the staff wellbeing at risk, the staff are absolutely exhausted doing back-to-back 12 hour shifts,” she said.
“You got nurses running from here, there and everywhere, you can see the strain, you can see the tiredness from everybody and you can also feel the worry.”
She said there had been an influx of patients with influenza and with respiratory syncytial virus, particularly children. The hospital had lost 10 senior nurses over the past year, and what Health New Zealand had offered to replace them was “definitely not good enough”, amounting to 1.4 full time equivalent nurses in permanent roles, a 0.8 full time equivalent six month fixed term position and a 0.8 full time equivalent health care assistant. Two new nurses have been hired so far this year.
In an interview with the Gisborne Herald published on 1 September, Dolman-Tuhou said she had worked more than 94 hours in a fortnight last month. “I absolutely love my job, but loving the job does not make the current situation sustainable,” she said in a statement.
Christine Warrander, another union delegate at the hospital and an acute care nurse, told the same paper that nurses were regularly in tears during and after hard shifts. “You can see on their faces as they’re coming in to do a shift, they’re just defeated … they’re completely broken down,” she said. Her worry, she said, was what happens if nothing changes. “If something doesn’t change, I think our fear in general in the nursing community is there’s going to be something happen to a patient.”
Here is the awkward part. By the Government’s own headline measure, Gisborne is one of the best emergency departments in the country. Health Minister Simeon Brown, who declined to comment directly on the strike, said in a statement that the delegates were working through a “genuinely hard winter” and that the Gisborne workforce was “considerably larger than it was three years ago”. He then pointed to the numbers. “Gisborne is one of the best-performing districts in the country against the Shorter Stays in Emergency Departments health target,” the statement said.
He is right about the figure. Health New Zealand’s own health targets factsheet for the January to March 2026 quarter puts Tairāwhiti third out of 20 districts on 91.3 percent, behind only the West Coast on 95.6 percent and South Canterbury on 91.8 percent. The national figure was 74.4 percent. Waikato managed 66.5 percent, Counties Manukau 70.5 percent, MidCentral 59.2 percent and Capital and Coast 57.6 percent, the worst in the country.
Both things can be true, because the target does not measure what the nurses are striking about. It counts the share of patients admitted, discharged or transferred within six hours of arriving. It is a stopwatch on the front door, and it says nothing about how many nurses were rostered to move those patients, how many shifts they worked back to back, or whether anyone got a meal break. Tairāwhiti recorded 6,319 emergency department attendances in that quarter, the fifth smallest volume of any district. In a department that size, losing 10 senior nurses in a year is not a rounding error.
The pressure is worse almost everywhere else. Latest figures from PHF Science, reported by RNZ on 4 September, show hospitalisations for severe acute respiratory illness across all ages ran at 16 per 100,000 people in the week to 30 August, classed as very high and the highest since 2015. Among under fives the rate hit 80.5 per 100,000, literally off the top of the agency’s chart, up from 74.7 the week before. The season has not peaked.
At Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, an emergency doctor described a late night surge on Wednesday 2 September as appalling, with 103 patients waiting in the queue at 11.15pm and seven doctors rostered overnight. Health New Zealand group director of operations for Counties Manukau, Vanessa Thornton, said there were 457 presentations in the 24 hours from midnight, and that one day in August the figure reached 494.
Tracy Chisholm, a union delegate and emergency nurse at Waikato Hospital, told RNZ her department regularly saw more than 300 presentations in a day, with waits of eight to 10 hours. “These waiting rooms are full, we have a cupboard with extra chairs in it so when we run out of chairs for the waiting room, we can find more chairs for people to sit in, or people sit in wheelchairs,” she said. “Some people just get so tired and exhausted that they’ll end up lying on the floor of an emergency department waiting room.” She said moving staff between pressured areas was not working. “If you rob from Peter to pay Paul, you’re kinda just moving the chairs on the Titanic.”
Waikato has had two deaths under review. A man was found unconscious in an emergency department toilet at the end of June and could not be saved. On Saturday RNZ reported a second patient had been found dead in a toilet at the hospital, this one on a surgical ward in mid August. Health New Zealand’s spokesman for the Waikato district, Dr Gary Hopgood, said that ward was fully staffed at the time and that a review had been triggered. Police said the death is not being treated as suspicious and has been referred to the Coroner.
On the Gisborne strike, Health New Zealand said it had been notified and that the department would stay open. “Safeguarding patient care is our priority,” it said. “If the strike goes ahead, the emergency department will remain open and appropriate measures will be put in place to maintain patient and staff safety and provide service continuity.” It added that Tairāwhiti was working through the department’s nursing staffing levels with the union, and remained committed to doing so in good faith.
Gisborne has been here before. In May 2023, nurses on the hospital’s Ward 5 struck for an hour over unsafe staffing after a provisional improvement notice went nowhere. Te Whatu Ora, as Health New Zealand was then known, went to the Employment Court to stop the strike and lost. Warrander was a delegate then too.
The next set of target results, covering April to June 2026, will show how districts held up as the flu season built. The winter quarter the nurses are actually living through will not be published until well into summer.
New Zealand’s emergency departments have been under this kind of strain for a while. We reported last month on patients waiting more than 24 hours at Wellington Hospital and on the late flu surge that could run into spring.
Have you been through an emergency department this winter, or do you work in one? Tell us what you saw in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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